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Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

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Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#151

Post by wayne_skylar »

joncp wrote: post #43
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

Remember when you didn't have to wade through that awful carousel view to find what you wanted to watch? Or when they didn't try to hide your "continue watching" list in a steaming heap of inaccurate recommendations? Except for a couple of shows, I've almost completely switched to Prime.

The Netflix UI is very abusive. They have no respect for the value of your time or your attention.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#152

Post by creeble »

philipkglass wrote: post #136
pjc50 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there was a narrow window when you could stream seemingly every film, ancient and modern, legitimately. Then the studios twigged and had to kill it.

I don't even mind paying on demand to stream a film. It's annoying and economically baffling when you can't stream a film even if you have your credit card in hand, ready to pay. Last weekend I tried to find To Live and Die in L.A. -- from the 1980s but hardly obscure. I couldn't find it legitimately available to stream anywhere , for any amount of money. I even tried Kanopy, which has been my go-to source for films…

And you sometimes can't even rent movies that you saw on Netflix as recently as a couple of years ago.

"Page Eight" was a great little spy movie with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz on Netflix. Now you can't rent from anywhere, for any price afaict.

How does this optimize revenues for the studios?

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#153

Post by derefr »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #57
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

I don't really like star systems because I spend way too much time deciding if something is 3 or 4 stars, or 4 or 5 stars. I much prefer textual descriptions; for example "Terrible", "Don't like", "Okay", "Like", "Favourite", which has the same options as a 5-star rating system, but choosing between 3/4 and 4/5 is much easier IMHO. I don't really know of any system that uses this, except this one music player I wrote…

I've always thought the best design for a star system would be a pair of positive/negative buttons, where the rating you give is the truncated logarithm of the number of times you press the button. So you can like or dislike things a little very easily, but you have to expend 10x as much effort to really like/dislike things, and 100x as much effort to express absolute adoration/hatred.

Effectively, this would be a "proof of emotional work": it's not a measure of your own subjective experience of your reaction to the product, but rather measuring your level of objectively-observable motivation to [dis]recommend the product. Which, I would think, would neatly get around all the arguments about "what it means" for something to be 3/4/5 stars—provoking a large number of people to click a like (or dislike!) button 10 times seems like a pretty good predictor of some objective property that the product has. (Whether that property is "quality" is up for debate.)

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#154

Post by PeterisP »

jfengel wrote: post #116
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

Netflix now has much better sources of information than the self-reported star ratings. Self-reported ratings fail in a lot of ways. Users can upvote what they think they're supposed to upvote. They'll downvote something, then go watch the sequel, because "It's terrible but I love it". And since they're seeking out stuff that they suspect they're going to like, they either compress all of the ratings into the top tie…

I'd like to explicitly make a point (your description seems to hint at it) that star ratings also indicate something orthogonal to liking stuff, something like segmentation of types of content.

Let's use a food analogy - I may go to a very fancy restaurant with exquisite food, and see that it holds up to its standards and is quite okay, and deserving all its stars. And in comparison I may have a basic hotdog or a sloppy burger, and admit that it's really nothing special, the fancy stuff was better, and that hotdog deserves less stars.... but at the same time that definitely does not mean that I always prefer the fancy stuff, and I can reasonably want that hotdog right now.

So that's the same with movie star ratings. I can at the same time agree that I liked movie A much better than movie B (and rank them accordingly), and I might re-watch movie A the fourth time and wouldn't bother with movie B ever... and at the same time not be in the mood for a complex movie like A, and want a simple, cheap, stupid movie similar to B, but with more explosions.

It's clear that 1 star sucks, but "5-star movies" and "4-star movies" perhaps simply indicate different genres of something roughly like "fancy" and "non-fancy" movies; and a fancy movie that's not really good doesn't get 4 stars but much worse; much like in the food analogy if the fancy restaurant serves something comparable in quality to that basic hotdog, it's not getting the same rating as the hot dog stand but much worse because of the unmet expectations.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#155

Post by pjc50 »

creeble wrote: post #152
philipkglass wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even mind paying on demand to stream a film. It's annoying and economically baffling when you can't stream a film even if you have your credit card in hand, ready to pay. Last weekend I tried to find To Live and Die in L.A. -- from the 1980s but hardly obscure. I couldn't find it legitimately available to stream anywhere , for any amount of money. I even tried Kanopy, which has been my go-to source for films…

And you sometimes can't even rent movies that you saw on Netflix as recently as a couple of years ago. "Page Eight" was a great little spy movie with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz on Netflix. Now you can't rent from anywhere, for any price afaict. How does this optimize revenues for the studios?

The only thing I can think of is a mind share argument: they want you to watch the latest blockbuster instead. The Disney Vault is the cynical endpoint of this line of thinking.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#156

Post by adrianmonk »

I think I've noticed another change in the few days too. This one related to closing credits.

Maybe a month back, they started cutting off playback as soon as closing credits started to roll. I can understand the motivation because sometimes credits are boring.

But other times, they are part of the enjoyment of watching the show. For example, every episode of "Grace and Frankie" ends with a different song, carefully chosen to fit in thematically with that episode. People have written articles about these song choices, made Spotify playlists, etc. Yet Netflix cut them off. (And that's a Netflix original show.)

Anyway, in the last few days, it seems like they've stopped doing this. They now have a button in the UI that will stop playing the credits, but the button looks different, and it doesn't cut the credits off by default.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#157

Post by kgwxd »

2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

They redefined their use of the word "recommended" from "we think you'll like this" to "we want you to watch this". That's what happens to every in-house rating system eventually, independent rating systems are better.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#158

Post by slg »

philipkglass wrote: post #87
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for star…

You are certainly right about Netflix's catalog decreasing, but that doesn't explain why Netflix's recommendations have been downgraded over time.

I am reminded of the show Tuca & Bertie. It was a new Netflix original from the same people who created BoJack Horseman. You would think it would be obvious to surface the new show to anyone who watched the old show. Except that never happened. The show's creator even commented that Netflix's algorithm never recommended her her own show. She had to manually search to find it.

The only real explanation is that Netflix believes it is more important for customers to think the catalog is large rather than the catalog is good. Netflix wants people to spend 10 minutes scrolling through crap to find something to watch instead of simply listing all the recommended content at the top and for people to notice that there are only a few good options.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#159

Post by hinkley »

ben174 wrote: post #39

I was actually watching TV last night and found myself hesitant to switch from Hulu to Netflix because deep in my head I was saying "oh that's the one with the noisy menus".

And don’t forget the volume check.

BUM BUUUMMMMM!

Goddamnit, I just woke up every mammal in the house.

Netflix; your jingle/call sign thing doesn’t need to be the loudest thing on on my TV. Get some group therapy, find your self esteem and chill the fuck out.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#160

Post by hinkley »

skynetv2 wrote: post #95
jonplackett wrote: post #49

Thanks Netflix! Next feature request: AUTO-SKIP-ALL-INTROS-AND-RECAPS-WHILE-BINGING

I like to watch intros and recaps sometimes. I like the current design where I can choose to skip if I want to.

The recaps often contain spoilers. When you’re binging, the story line is too recent and it’s a lot easier to read into the scene selection.

If they do a clip of someone we thought died six episodes ago, guess what, they aren’t dead.

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